On Sunday, May 19, Iran lost the president of the Islamic Republic and a potential successor to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the current 85-year-old keystone of the system. The regime was dealt a considerable blow with the death of Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash alongside Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian.

With Raisi's death, Iran did not lose a charismatic figure. Quite the contrary, in fact. He was able to rise in the hierarchy because, unlike some of his otherwise popular predecessors, he never deviated an inch from the line imposed by the Supreme Leader. He embodied, to the point of caricature, the ultraconservative and particularly authoritarian bent of the Islamic Republic.

He was elected in 2021, in a ballot from which the reformist current, long tolerated in a political game locked up tightly by the Council of Guardians of the Constitution, had been carefully sidelined. His truncated term of office was marked mainly by the bloody crushing of the protest movement sparked by the death of the young Mahsa Amini at the hands of the morality police in September 2022.

Such levels of protest accentuated the divorce between Iranian society exasperated by the confiscation of its freedoms and the imperialism of a regime obsessed with its survival, within which the Islamic Revolutionary Guard carries ever greater weight under Khamenei's command.

Closed-loop operation

There's no doubt that the divide will be reflected in the presidential election that will soon be held to elect Raisi's successor. In March, during the parliamentary elections held in conjunction with those for the Assembly of Experts, responsible for choosing the Supreme Leader, the official abstention rate was the highest since the birth of the regime in 1979. The elections were also marked by the disqualification of candidates considered moderate or reformist, such as former president Hassan Rohani, with some of the excluded candidates calling for a boycott of the polls.

Nor is there any doubt that the hard line that the regime has set for itself will maintain unchanged since it operates in a vacuum that allows for nothing other than self-reproduction, from which Iranians can only feel excluded. It does not, however, protect it from tremors such as the attack on its soil claimed by the jihadist organization Islamic State group, in January, or Israel's alleged bombing of the Iranian consulate in Syria in April, which was followed by an unprecedented attack on Israel. Unpredictability has become the norm between the two enemies, with all the risks of misreading each other's intentions.

Staying on this path is certainly not a course for stability in the Middle East. Domestic unrest and external pressure will only push the Iranian regime in its quest for nuclear weapons, perceived as life insurance. This pursuit is another source of tension, likely to encourage Iran's neighbors to enter the same race for the ultimate weapon, at the cost of an increased risk of proliferation.